Is my graphics card underperforming?

A few things I willsay about overclocking.

It can be as simple or complex as you want to make it.

A 25% speed increase, (your 2.66 920 to 3.3), is relatively easy to achieve without increasing voltage, heat, or the life of your processer by more than an insignificant margin. It can be as easy as raising the frequency of the front side bus without changing any other settings, such as CPU voltage.

I run my 3.0 Quad at 3.6 24/7 at stock voltage. The I7s will OC up to around 4.4 on air.

The first 25% speed increase is easy, it's when you get up to increases of 30-40% or more that voltages, heat, and instability start becoming hard to manage.

jevery57

If a 25% speed increase is as easy and safe to perform as you say it is, then maybe I should consider it, any chance you can link me to any guides?

First thing that I would do is download and install three or four free monitoring programs to fully load your processor and to monitor heat, voltages, and CPU frequency, (speed). They are,

Prime 95 to fully load your processor to check stability and max temps under full load

Core Temp or Real Temp to monitor CPU temps, EDIT(amaximum CPU temp would be 67c).

CPU-Z to monitor OC frequencies and voltages

I'd install these programs and before attempting an OC make careful note of CPU temps (idle and full load) and CPU voltage.

Then go into the BIOS and set a modest OC

Looking at you manual it appears that you have a couple of different ways to achieve a moderate OC.

You could use the "CPU Intelligent Accelerator 2 (C.I.A.2)" automatic overclock function

Or you could simply raise the CPU frequence using the "Base Clock (BCLK) Control"

What you want to achieve is max stable speed without raising CPU voltage more than just a little. Temps shouldn't be a problem unless you start cranking the voltages.

Bump it up a little at a time, run Prime 95 for a while and watch temps for the first 4-5 minutes until they stabilize to make sure your cooler can handle the OC without excessive heat. Or just use the automatic OC, but still run Prime 95 to check stability and above all monitor temps (especially with a stock cooler).

All in all you should be able to bump it to 3.2 or so with the auto feature and maybehigher manually.

Last but not least, watch out - overclocking is addictive - You'll be looking a big coolers and asking questions about other's BIOS settings i no time.

Do a 3DMark06 benchmark run.A stock clock I7 with a 295 should score somewhere over 20,000 without overclocking.

jevery57

Did you say you had the stock heatsink? And i wouldnt got above 65c... 80c is too high :?

Your right, I did some quick research and based it on this

"In this mode system passed all stability tests without problems, but further frequency increase resulted into Prime95 failure, and even additional processor voltages increase didn't help. Looks like 3.8GHz frequency is the maximum our test Core i7-920 processor can do, even though the temperature of the hottest CPU core during our stability tests reached only 86°C, while the critical temperature limit is set at 100°C

From this article

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-920-overclocking_11.html

While Intel's official limit is 68c

http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLBCH

Now I'm gonna have to do some more research

Thanks very much for that guide Jevery :)